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Saturday, 28 January 2012

Window Repair

An IT company is moving into a mid-19th century building in the Park Circus area of Glasgow and needs to have the window on the half landing from the ground to first floor repaired.

Window from below

This is a large window of nearly 1400 mm wide and approximately 2000 mm high. It has a large number of broken panes, although only two - where you see the tape - have fallen out. The textures are important for this window. Fortunately, I have an exact or very near match for almost all of the clear pieces.

Upper sash

The difficulty is to get yellow glass to match the borders of this window. There are two main shades of yellow and a few variations - all in a seedy glass. Seedy is a term for intentional bubbles in the glass. Various manufacturers have different ways of getting the bubbles. I am told by the people at English Antique Glass that they throw a potato into the pot just before gathering the glass to blow.

I have looked through my glass stocks and samples and have found one yellow seedy that will match.
For the other shades I will have to stain some clear seedy to get a good match.

Window from above

The above photo just gives an impression of the colour generated on the wood of the reveal. I think this is important to preserve. So the experimentation has begun to obtain the correct shade of golden yellow.

Bottom sash

This will be in process for a while - making samples and testing them against the window - before staining suitably sized pieces to replace the broken ones. These pieces will be cut on site to fit into the original place.

Of course, there is no easy way to do the repairs from the outside without incurring large charges for scaffolding.